Last month, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch assigned four reporters from its depleted newsroom to produce a front-page two-story package – ranging longer than 2,000 words, roughly four-times the length of a typical news report – about St. Louis Community College Chancellor Myrtle E.B. Dorsey. Despite the alarmist positioning of the story under the doom-and-gloom, thick-and-bold headline “Dorsey’s downfall,” the chancellor is guilty of no wrongdoing. The news nugget wrapped in this elaborate package was that the college Board of Trustees had deadlocked 3-3 in renewing her contract.
“There must be more to it,” we reported at the time in our political column, making note of the Post’s drastic overplay of the story – “and indeed, there is.” At the time, we teased out the racial dynamics that operated under the surface of the Post report. “The Post sources five faculty members [opposed to Dorsey] without identifying any by race,” we noted. “Since all five faculty members are white and the chancellor they opposed is black, their race might be pertinent. The Post has no black editor who would have seen this copy or discussed how the story would be played, and all four Post reporters who worked on the story package are white.”
This analysis in our Political EYE column turned up two inside sources from the college who are sympathetic to our reporting, and who insisted there is still more to the story. We have since interviewed one of these sources, and Rebecca S. Rivas’ front-page news report in today’s paper documents the facts in this source’s claims. The other source has not yet come forth, and we continue to check the claims this person made in a long, cogent but anonymous letter mailed to the newspaper.
What is clear, at this point, is that the Post missed the story in its reflexive siding with the disgruntled white faculty opposed to the black chief executive. Dorsey may or may not have a high-handed, non-collegial management style, as her critics claim. If so, this certainly would not be unusual in St. Louis, where our executive class has the full range of human foibles typically found among hard-driving leaders of large organizations. Dorsey’s tone shift in how she handled professional development may have been jarring to a faculty that, as our reporting makes clear, had grown accustomed to some very generous perks. But what is now certain is that a new chancellor brought a new level of fiscal accountability and restraint, as well as concern for students’ long-term success at the college, and this threatened entrenched faculty and counselors who were benefitting financially from more lax management practices.
According to the May 2013 finance report to the Board of Trustees, the college has reduced part-time and overload salaries by $2.1 million, compared to the 2011-2012 academic year, under Dorsey’s leadership. This money, as our reporting makes clear, came directly from the pockets of veteran faculty, who had been exploiting a lax system of overload pay to push their salaries into the six-figure range, in many cases. By enforcing discipline on this unregulated pay process and saving the college money, Dorsey made some bitter enemies among faculty and its union leadership. The fact that it was an independently minded African-American executive who uncovered and cracked down on practices that benefitted a largely white faculty may have contributed to the vitriol of the opposition (and how dramatically the Post played the story), but Dorsey’s so-called “downfall” is attributable to her fiscal discipline and its faculty discontents, more than her leadership style.
Whoever leads the college moving forward, we expect them to be accountable for sound management of this vital institution of higher education. We hope that the Post and other stakeholders join us in urging the new chancellor to institute needed fiscal reforms at a college system that is central to our workforce development and, therefore, to the viability and prosperity of the region.
